Dowbrigade

(This story was written last night but we couldn’t post it because of fading wi-fi and near terminal exhaustion)

You know you’ve reached the big time in American Journalism when
Jerry Springer comes to call. The talk-show-host turned politician
just stopped into Blogger’s Row.  He
is shaking hands and signing autographs.  We will try to ask him
a few questions., like if he knows what a blog is.

Appearantly he does, although he doesn’t write one or even read them.
  However, he has an acute sense of catching the wave of a rising
new tide, and has become convinced, he told us, that "This is the new
politics, the modern day politics."

Several bloggers crowd around.  We want to ask him some questions.
Some bloggers just wnat to get their picture taken with him. But Jerry
is not in a mood to be interviewed.

Oh no, Jerry is interviewing US.  He doesn’t want to answer questions,
he wants to ask them. In fact, he has come equipped with a camera and
microphone crew, unobtrusively blocking our view of the floor, and proceed
to ask several of the more photogenic bloggers questions like "How do
you think of things to write about?"

Behind us two 18-year olds are talking
on their cellphones about how cool it is
to
be at the convention and
what
kind
of
view they
have of
the screen from their seats.  They are so absorbed in their preening
that they haven’t noticed the media event happening a few feet in front
of them.  Suddenly they notice the man with the microphone.

"Oh my God, Oh my God, its Jerry Springer, he’s UP
HERE
WITH US!"

We decided it was a good time for a bathroom break.

Tonight we took the shuttle bus from Coply Plaza to the Fleet Center.
  It was eerie being the only vehicle on the recently completed Big
Dig I-95 extension, shooting us under the center of the city directly
to the parking behind the convention. Our bus, like the majority of the
others, parks as far away as possible from the fenced in protesters. As
we descend and march into the Fleet we pass no closer than a football
field away from them. It doesn’t really matter, since the police have
added a heavy plastic tarp to the cocoon containing the protesters, shrouding
them in shadows and making it impossible for them to see out and possibly
take aim at a delegate….

In fact, all we can see over on that side of the lot are a few curious
individuals and families with kids, one little girl holding an ice cream
cone in her left hand and a blue Kerry ’04 balloon in the right, looking
for all the world like suburbanites in town for a summer’s day at the
zoo. Behind the double chain-link fence dark shadows moved in the only
evidence the protest zone was actually occupied.

Tonight’s speaking schedule includes Teddy Kennedy, who is speaking
now, Howard Dean and a ton of Kerry and Edwards kids.  Teddy is
getting a fantastic ovation, of course he is a Massachusetts favorite
son, he seems in fine form as he welcomes the delegates to "my town…where
every street is history’s home."

Teddy has gained a gravitons as a senior statesman which would have
served him well back when he was a player in presidential politics.  As
it is, this is shaping up as a Last Harrah of sorts, and he obviously
is taking pleasure in being able to once again launch a Massachusetts
Senator on the road to the White House. We are sure he is looking forward
to sleepovers with the Kerrys.

One of the repeated themes, Kennedy echoing Clinton echoing Gore, is
clearly "This is the most important election of our times." Is this true?
The depth of the resolve to unseat the Bush Bunch is impressive, and
one gets the feeling that if Adam Sandler had won the Democratic Primaries
the entire party would be breathlessly massing behind the "Waterboy".

This is not to say that there is no real enthusiasm for Kerry. He is
trying hard to transcend the Anybody But Bush label and establish an
independent identity in the minds of the 99% of the US electorate that
don’t read blogs or follow anything that happens in American politics
between presidential elections.

"More than 900 of our servicemen and women have paid the ultimate price"
Tell ‘em Ted.

Kerry’s speech on Thursday night will go a long way toward achieving
that aim.  It will be the template over which all of his subsequent
speeches will be laid. When he give official statements, reacts to the
news, appears in campaign commercial swing state blitzes, the images
will be seen in the context of how he appears and what he says 48 hours
from now.

Teddy has them stomping in the aisles. His unmistakable Kennedy
tone and inflection flood through the festooned hall. The audience is
transfixed
as the stentorian phrases roll off his gilded Irish tongue. "armed only
with faith and hope, like the marchers in Birmingham" "Our struggle is
not with some ruler named George, who inherited the crown, although sometimes
it seems that way"

However, for all the fire and eloquence of his speech, it seems he still
can’t get any respect in his own party, seeing as how he got scheduled
on "kids night" with the Kerry, Edwards and Reagan progeny rather than
with the "grownups" later in the schedule.

Meanwhile, an air of exhaustion has set in on blogger’s row, and around
the convention center in general. Obviously, convention virgins like most
of the Bloggers don’t yet know how to pace themselves for a four day marathon,
or they lack access to drugs of sufficient strength or quality to keep
a decent edge on. We should have known better, being a veteran of numerous
4-day conferences around the globe over the years – they all melt down
after a couple of days and then pick up steam again as participants get
their second wind and come to the desperate realization that the hours
they have left to have a historic good time are limited and dwindling,
so they better get cracking.

At this point, at least in major league events like this, a manic and
artificial euphoria takes hold, fueled by self-fulfilling expectation
and mammoth amounts of booze, and in our experience anything can happen.  With
this many people that close to the edge, fueled by exhaustion and a desperate
desire to get laid, careers can be made or ended by an inadvertent slip,
like the time the Senator from Missouri was discovered stark naked and
tied to a bed in a dude ranch outside of Reno, NV.

So we will try to keep our eyes open and our antennae tuned.  The
Dowbrigade works best when lack of sleep and recycled adrenaline boost
him up to an altered state of sensitivity and controlled paranoia. A
crowd this big can only be mollified for so long without anything real
happening before they MAKE something real happen. So stay tuned…..

If knowing how to waste millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money
is a prerequisite for governing this great country in this day and
age, the Democratic Party is demonstrating that they are highly qualified
to take the reins of power.

Obviously, this bash is not, technically, being paid for by the taxpayers.
True, the contributors to the National Party are taxpayers,
or at least their shareholders are, but they have contributed "voluntarily",
in
the interest of, shall we say, greasing the gears of
the Democratic mechanism. Not content with funding the politicians
in power, these masochists give money to out-of-power politicians practicing how
to wallow in the public trough.

This weeks Democratic National Convention is an excellent example of
over-the-top over-planning, over-spending and conspicuous over-consumption.
The price tag for this 4-day love fest? Around $100 million dollars.

Of course the REAL big boys, the team these guys are auditioning to
replace, have just wasted $100 BILLION bucks, throwing it onto a sinkhole
in the desert in hope that in time it will bubble back up to the surface
in the form of a 40-year revenue stream for Haliburton and the oil companies.
As slick a scam, in terms of a large scale redistribution of income from
the poor to the rich, as we have seen in a long time.

The reality is that all the real business of the convention could be
done in a day and a night, a single session with a nationally televised
climax, all of the interesting stuff concentrated in one thrill-packed
day. Cynics will say that all of the interesting stuff could be concentrated
in a 60-second campaign ad, but even in the activity-intense time-pressured
modern world such an important rite of democracy deserves a whole day.

And, solely for the sake of following the parallelism, let us say that
the entire adventure in Iraq should have been over in 3 weeks and everybody
should have been home again inside of a month. And if they somehow managed
to mount a serious threat against the United STates within our lifetimes,
well, we’d go in and do it again.  But this occupation business
is way too sordid and twisted for Americans to absorb without becoming
anti-Americans.

Today are the state caucuses, and these serve a purpose in that they
allow the party organization in each state to take care of business and
schmooze in an exotic, out-of-town locale. Why can’t they take care of
business and schmooze in the privacy of their home states? Well, we suppose
there is a benefit to the party from having all the troops in one place
before the big battle. But even with a second day for the party caucuses,
this should be a two-day event, tops.

After all, the main item on the agendas of most delegates and all members
of the media is to PAH-TEY. When the Fleet Center session broke up last
night, after the climatic speeches by the Clintons, all the talk of the
exiting masses was which party are you going to, how late do the subways
run, how late do the bars stay open, how stupid is that, how far away
is Cambridge, what the fastest way out of here. We have know who the
candidate will be since Super Tuesday, over four months ago, and the
party platform was hammered out way before this shindig began.

Myth and image to the contrary, we doubt much actual deal making takes
place at the convention.  It is a chance to network, to meet the
people you will be working with over the coming years, to put faces to
names, to observe personal habits and try to position oneself for the
coming rush to power.

As for your intrepid correspondent, which Power Party did we attend
last night?  Unfortunately, as we were exiting the Fleet Center,
sometime after 11, being regurgitated by the building in an irresistible
gush of anxious humanity, we realized that we didn’t have our keys. Car,
work, home they had all been attached to an Ecuadorian key ring/bottle
openers reading "Mitad del Mundo". We had left them at the super-efficient
but intimidating x-ray, secret service security checkpoint on the way
into the Convention.

We got off the subway in Kenmore Square and hailed a cab.  $20
later, around 12:30, we arrived home.  This morning when we arrived
at the office at 7:30 there was a ticket on our car at the meter where
we had left it before heading to the Fleet yesterday. $30 for No Overnight
Parking.  At least the car was still there.

This afternoon we get to ask the Secret Service if they’ve seen an Ecuadorian
bottle-opener key ring.  We are certainly looking forward to that.
We bet those Secret Service guys really know how to party.

Reuters
photo by Marc Serota

It is somewhat overwhelming being a part of the Blogging Contingent
which is expected to save Convention coverage from the morass of insignificance
and self-serving shucksterism into which it has fallen during the past
few decades.

Hell,up until a couple of months ago, our biggest story was about a woman who made a model of a Harley Davidson out of butter.

Last night we had dinner with a group of Power Bloggers, heavy hitters in the Blogsphere and the business world, who were trading
stories mixing the early days of Blogging, when apparently one needed
to blog in a CLI environment and upload via 16 kps modems, with descriptions
of skeet-shooting with Kerry. We felt totally juvenile, outclassed and out-of-place, as if at any
moment we would be sent back to the "kids table"

Following dinner, we walked down Massachusetts Avenue to a typical Boston
Irish bar named "The Field". , which had been designated as the meetup point for a much younger and hipper group of PowerBloggers. The comparatively staid
group with whom we had dined declined to enter the raucous environment
of the Pub, and we probably should have headed home like the rest of
the Grownups. However, we decided to drop into the bar, where a number
of credentialed and uncredentialed bloggers had arranged to meet to discuss strategy
and tactics, for "just one beer".

In the restaurant we felt like a kid,  in the bar we felt like
Methuselah.  We were easily the oldest of the dozen bloggers gathered
around a pair of round bar tables pulled hastily together.  And
these young bloggers were smart and edgy sharks, circling conversationally searching
for the scent of blood in the waters.  They knew everyone and everything
about the party bigwigs, the mover’s and shakers of the political blogosphere,
and were expert at cadging invitations to the choicest parties on the
program. They wore thier ambition like epulets on their shoulders.

The conversation centered around who was going to be where, and which
parties had open access to the top-shelf booze.  They seemed to
know everything, but none of them knew where John Kerry was at that very
moment, except the Dowbrigade.  On the way to the bar we had stopped
at our parked car and heard the Candidate throw out the ceremonial first
pitch at the baseball game between the Red Sox and Yankees, at Fenway
Park, barely a mile from where we were sitting.

Disparaging finding anything else to contribute to this supercharged
conversation, we excused ourselves after just one beer and went to catch the end of the ballgame while driving home.

But in between the restaurant and the bar, we had an interesting interaction
with the Muffin guy at the Harvest organic food store in Central Square,
from where the lovely Norma Yvonne had requested a muffin when we called
home earlier.

"What kind of muffins you got tonight?" we asked.

"Uh, blueberry and mango," he answered after checking.

We needed to check too. "Hold on, I need to phone in for instructions."

The Muffin guy, in his early twenties and decked out in post-punk rings
and ripped threads, looked at us with barely restrained disdain.

"What, you mean you can’t make the Muffin decision on your own?" he
seemed to us to be sneering.

"Well," we mewed defensively, "I’m not the one who is going to eat them,
so I’m not the one who is going to make the decision…"

We made the call.  Norma Yvonne like both blueberry and mango,
and so we settled on one of each. We informed the Muffin Man, who turned
to drop the two pastries into a white waxed bag, now completely convinced
we were incapable of making a decision, even one as stress-free as what
muffins to bring our wife.

As he handed us the bag, he leaned his head close and advised helpfully,
"Try to stay focused, man."

Damn, how did he know…..

After some technical problems with the Wi-Fi address we are now online,
live and direct from the floor of the Democratic National Convention.
The photo above was taken this afternoon, from the small stage within
the Steel Cage designated as the official Protest Pen. Note the
razor wire and mesh netting designed to protect the regular democrats
from the protesters.

Right now, on the podium directly across from our seats, they are introducing
the last Presidential candidate the Dowbrigade voted for who actually
won – Jimmy Carter.

Of all of the players we have been able to identify so far, the protestors,
the police, the party big-wigs, the reporters and the convention organizers,
the most charmingly innocent and naive are the delegates themselves.  The
politicians may be sleazy and cynical, the reporters may be jaded and
unscrupulous, but the delegates, the rank-and-file, everyday Democratic
delegates, elected by their friends and neighbors in primary elections
or selected in statewide caucuses way back in the winter.  These
are real people, teachers and librarians, farmers and store owners. And,
amazingly in
this day
and age, they still
believe in the promise of the City on the Hill, the vision of the Founding
Fathers, and the good intentions of the leaders of the only political
party they have ever known, most of them, their entire lives.

Carter has made his slow dignified way to the podium and is about to
start his speech. Signing off, for now……

The bloggers who have worked their fingers to the bone to get here
and understandably miffed that with the current cachet surrounding Blogging
everybody and his buddy has a blog up and running. At the Blogger;s Bunch
this morning we heard from one Senate candidate from Illinois who proudly
proclaimed :"I have a Blog now" but didn’t;t know the address and couldn’t
understand why we all sniggered when, upon being asked how much of the
blogging he actually did, declared "I guaranteed I’m at least reading
everything we;re putting up."

A few minutes later we heard from legendary AP writer and columnist
Walter Mears, who also, coincidentally, just started a blog.  He
couldn’t remember the address either, but noted it is available from
the AP web page.  This was the fourth or fifth time we have heard
from mainstream reporters that they have recently established blogs,
at the
behest of their employers, for the express purpose of blogging the convention
and campaign.

Three has been a minor epistemological argument going on among bloggers
as to whether these blogs really are blogs, whether there is room even
under the "Big Tent" theory of blog variety for these disposable, single
purpose blogs.  The consensus seems to be "No" and we tend to agree,
but not for the usual reasons.

Not because they are getting paid for blogging do their sites not qualify.
The employment status of the blogger is not what makes a blog.  Neither
is it the reverse chronological nature of the postings or the unedited
voice of a single writer. We have concluded that either form nor function
define what makes a blog a blog, since every time anyone proposes a limiting
definition, someone else points to a site which is outside the proposed
limitations and is yet clearly a blog.

Blogging is not any of these things.  Blogging is an attitude,
and these flash in the pan, media created blogs don’t get that, and so
they don’t got it.

This morning at the fashionably late hour of 10 am, in the Fenway
suite of the Hilton, we attended the Blogger’s Brunch, an official welcome
on the part of some of the party joes who
are in
charge of keeping us on-line and out of trouble.  We can tell that
they are a bit nervous, slightly edgy, at the novel challenge of riding
herd on a bunch of in predictable bloggers.

Maybe their mates or drinking buddies have been telling them horror
stories, some possibly true, of the grazing and mating habits of bloggers
in general. But we were on our best behavior as a parade of quasi-famous
hacks and hanger’s on told us how important, and innovative, and exciting
we were.

The surprise featured speaker at the Brunch was the man who started
all this Internet in mainstream politics, Gov. Dr. Howard Dean. He bounced
into the room, seemingly completely recovered from the savage thrashing
he took at the hands of the enemies of the opening up of the political
process.  He opened by taking credit for all of our invitations
to the convention, and took it from there. He was more relaxed and convincing
than either of the times we had seen him in New Hampshire.

During an extended Q & A he revealed that he really did not blame the
Major Media for the failure of his campaign, and that he did more than
enough wrong to have blown it without any help from them.

When he started talking about the Internet is when things got interesting.
"The critical lesson has not yet been learned," he declared, "Blogs do
work!" He really seemed to  have absorbed the fact that it
wasn’t about the money, but about the INTERACTIVITY, and the capacity
of the internet to allow ordinary people to get involved in politics
again.

When the Dowbrigade asked Dean if he had talked with Kerry or his campaign
about what the Internet is good for anything besides raising money, he
immediately got cagey and reverted to talking like a politician. "In
the past few months I have gotten to know John Kerry quite well, as a
friend, and I am indeed advising him and consulting closely with his
campaign,  And I don’t feel at liberty to discuss the contents of
those conversations."

We took that as a definite yes, although an evasive smarmy yes. Perhaps
seeing our frown, he softened and added, "Although discussions like this
might have been something we might have talked about."

But the thing that most impressed us and stayed with us was the fire
and resentment when a blogger asked him if our inclusion in the Convention
meant that we were :"real" journalists now. He responded by wondering
if it was really a designation we should aspire to, considering the major
media scandals of the past few years. He said that in many ways he found
the opinionated, from-the-heart ranting’s of bloggers more honest than
the affectedly "objective" reporting of the major papers and networks.

At this point he gave the most effective and succinct of what;s wrong
with modern American journalism we have ever heard.  "They say that
all of their coverage is objective, and sure, in the first few paragraphs
they present the basic who what when or where.  But by the third
paragraph they are speculating – If this happens, it means…… or,
The result could be that…… and what follows IS NOT FACT, IT IS SPECULATION.
It is opinion, and yet they are presenting it as objective news!  And
they are doing this over and over and over, throughout the newspaper."

Amen.  At least the Dowbrigade and his ilk let you know from the
gitgo that we are an opinionated son of a bitch, so take it for what
its worth…

There was a feeling of festivities in the streets of Boston as we
walked across Copley Square to pick up our credentials at the Westin
Hotel. Like New Year Eve’s Day, when people are packing in supplies
for parties, and the dozens of downtown stages are being set for the
First
Night performances and the artists are putting the finishing touches
on the ice sculptures in the Public Garden. Except, of course,
it is the middle of the summer. And the fact that we are surrounded,
on every corner, from every nearby roof and overpass, in parked cars
and patrolling above in helicopters and F-16s, by the forces or order.

Before we can even get to the hotel to pick up our Press Passes we are
confronted by a reporterly moment. As we come out onto the Square, we
see that it is awash in a thousand independent yet synchronized swirls
of yellow fabric. It takes a second to register, but it is indeed a sea
of inscrutable asians, easily identifiable to the reportorial eye as
members of the Chinese Martial Art/Philosophy/Sect Falun
Gong, due to
the smooth synchronization of their stylized moments, and the fact that
they were carrying huge red and gold banners reading FALUN DAFA.

There were at LEAST 5,000 of them in the sqyuare.  They were behind
banner identifying them as being from Israel, Holland, Singapore, everywhere
else in the world.  We stopped to ask one of them what was going
on, and she said that they were protesting the treatment of members of
their movement at the hands of the Chinese government.

Which brought to mind the question, why if all of the other homegrown
groups wishing to influence the opinions of the opinion-makers had been
relegated
to
the infamous "Steel
Cage", were the largest group of foreign protestors
being given the Red Carpet treatment, in the middle of Copley Square.  Obviously,
they had applied for and been granted a permit for this huge demonstration.  We
wondered if the Buddhists were by any chance major contributors to the
Democratic Party. We doubted that the Anarchists in the Black Tea
Society gave much this election cycle.

So no cage for the Gong Show, nor, it is beginning to appear, for most
of the other protest groups. Almost all have announced that they want
nothing to do with the Steel Cage, and will be doing their protesting
elsewhere, thank you. Where exactly that is going to be has not been
publicly announced, nor is it immediately apparent.  Given the
tight utilization of space around the Fleet Center, and the even tighter
layers of security, it is hard to imagine an organized group of protesters
getting within shouting distance of an actual, live delegate.

Yesterday afternoon we wandered around back of the Fleet Center to get
our first up-close and personal look at the Protesters
Holding Pen.  We
were not disappointed.  Looking more like some high-tech slaughterhouse,
with double fenced chutes and narrow passageways to channel the theoretical
demonstrators past the huge empty parking lots where tour busses will
be off-loading the delegates each afternoon as they report for duty at
the Convention Center, it is hard to see the area as in any way affiliated
with free speech or the exercise of constitutional rights. It is a holding
pen, without water, electricity or toilets, better suited to animals
than human beings.

So where will the protesters go as an alternative?  How will they
be able to congregate, demonstrate and march if every street corner and
rooftop are occupied by the forces of order which have announced that
they will tolerate no protests outside the Cage?

The Falun Gong suggest one possible option, and we are not referring
to donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party. Surprise,
unexpected protests are something of a Falun Gong specialty, ever since
the group originally came to the alarmed attention of the leadership
in Beijing
on the legendary morning of April 25, 1999. The Central Committee of
the Communist Party had been investigating the organization for months,
and had recently rescinded its licence as a sanctioned martial art,
supposedly because of the philosophical (some say religious) nature
of its teachings.

As the early morning fog lifted that April morning, horrified officials
of the Chinese Government were astounded to see that the entire headquarters
building for the Communist Party was surrounded by blissed-out, hand-holding,
chanting members of the Falun Gong movement. Over 10,000 Gongists
had assembled silently in the pre-dawn darkness. The most alarming part
was that the ubiquitous Chinese intelligence services had
received
not an inkling of the impending mass demonstration, and that it had
all be arranged quickly and silently, within 48 hours, via cell phones
and pagers.

The ability of this mysterious organization to quickly mobilize tens
of thousands of organized, disciplined demonstrators scared the bejeezus
out of the Communists, as well it might, given China’s history of periodic
upheaval at the hands of fanatical religious movements and cults.

We felt anticipatory shudders of possibility during the short fifteen
minutes of fame alloted to "Flash
Mobs" about a year ago.  Remember
Flash
Mobs? Hundreds of participants would suddenly and simultaneously
arrive at a prearranged performance location, usually a busy city intersection
or inside a store or other public place, do some seemingly random and
bizarre act of Zen street theater, and then after a very few moments
melt away into the crowd or disappear into the urban underbrush.

An interesting phenomena, but as it seemed to serve no other purpose
than to get noticed and give a group of individuals who seemed to have
an excess of time on their hands something to do, it soon faded into
another half-forgotten phase of foolishness.

But what would happen, we remember wondering, if a political group started
using this technique to organize protests or demonstrations? Flash mobs
floating unseen through large crowds at major events, becoming organized
and visible
only at some
prearranged
cue
given
by cell
phone or wireless IM, performing an act of political protest or civil
disobedience, and then disappearing in seconds simply by stopping to
act in concert and blending into the background. How would the Forces
of
Order handle that?

If ever a situation called out for innovative methods of opening up
the political discussion and bringing to the attention of the general
public items which will not appear on the official party agenda, this
is it.  The authorized avenue of public protest is criminally inadequate
and effectively shut down. Alternative sites for protest are off-limits
and closely patrolled.  But
a Flash Mob Protest might have a chance of penetrating the public
consciousness.  At
the very least it would attract the press like flies.

Has anyone else been thinking along these lines?  Is the moment ripe yet for the first Flash Mob political protest? It
would be a shame to think that the voices of dissent have been successfully
silenced by such a transparent and cynical ploy as arranging for them
to give their speeches in a concentration camp.

Every night, after the sun goes down and an army of tired office
workers and business people leave downtown Boston in a mass exodus to
the nearby towns and suburbs, another army invades the center of the
city. Thousands upon thousands of humble janitors, cleaning personnel,
trash collectors and maintenance workers flood into the area and work
through the night, starting at the highest floors of the urban skyscrapers
and working their way down to street level, cleaning as they go. They
remain invisible and anonymous to the members of the mainstream economy,
who arrive each morning to find their offices clean, their wastebaskets
empty and their floors waxed and shiny.

One of the poignant ironies of US Immigration Policy is that a great
number, perhaps the majority of the these workers, are undocumented illegal
aliens, often working two or three jobs and sending home monthly payments
to relatives in economic disaster areas. These payments, in some countries,
represent the second or third largest source of national income, outstripping
exports, loans and tourism, and keeping millions of people from starvation,
if not poverty.

This week, however, many of these phantom night-workers are shaking
in their boots, afraid that the incredibly intense police presence on
the streets of Boston represents a serious threat of detention, arrest
and deportation. In many cases these people have scarring memories
of the the traditional treatment of powerless peasants at the hands of
third world police forces…

For many immigrant workers in Boston, the security checkpoints, subway
searches, and beefed-up police presence for the Democratic National
Convention are more than just pesky commuter inconveniences. They’re
cause for alarm and anxiety.

Many undocumented workers fear they will be detained or
even deported if they are stopped by police checking for identification.
Even immigrants here legally, especially those who fled countries with
repressive governments, are shaken by the prospect of random stops and
searches.

from the Boston Globe